Kitty Kelley Digs Dirt, Dollars : Nancy Reagan Next for Biographer of Celebrities

Beginning in February of this year, I tried to interview journalist/author Kitty Kelley for this article. I called her home in Georgetown and left messages on her answering machine, which played Sinatra singing “My Way.”

She called back a week later and politely demurred. “Tell your editor I’m not sanguine towards it,” she said.

Shortly thereafter, she announced that her next subject would be Nancy Reagan. The advance is believed to be about $3.5 million. I called again. And again. Finally, an answer, on shocking pink stationery: She was still busy. In June, I tried again, by letter and phone. The taped message had changed; now Sinatra sang, “If you asked me, I could write a book.”

Still no response. Certified mail requesting an interview was returned. A hand-delivered request elicited a phone call from an assistant, who stated that Kelley “has just left town.”

It seemed plain enough: Like her famous subjects, Kitty Kelley, author of “The Glamour Spas’ ‘ ; “Jackie Oh!”; “Elizabeth Taylor, the Last Star”; and “His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra,” wasn’t talking.

DIGGING FOR DOLLARS

Yes (I am) very rich. And I’m going to get even richer. I don’t mind saying it. I worked damn hard for it. --Kitty Kelley, 1978

Hell, for a million dollars, I’d write about Donald Duck. --Kitty Kelley, 1981

Money has never been a motivating factor in my life, ever. --Kitty Kelley, 1986

Kitty Kelley has been called the pit bull of the unauthorized biography, the doyenne of dirt, a scalp-hunting biographer. Her books debut at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. There’s gold in them thar celebrity undies, and no one does a better job of mining it.

With her advance for the Nancy Reagan book, Kitty Kelley is the capital’s best-paid writer--No. 6, in fact, among Washington’s top 100 breadwinners, according to estimates by Washingtonian magazine. In 1987, she is said to have earned $3.5 million--an amount she subsequently characterized as too low. She made more than Ted Koppel, Bob Woodward, Tip O’Neill. More than Henry Kissinger, Willard Scott, George Will, Donald Regan, Cal Ripken Jr. Asked about objections from those she’s written about, Kelley told one interviewer: “I say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m on my way to the bank.’ ”

Stalking celebrities has made her one of them. Witty, articulate and ever ready with the juiciest tidbits, she is boffo with talent coordinators and talk-show hosts. She faces criticism with hard facts--and a healthy dose of cute. When Donahue badgers, Kelley leans forward in pink satin with a prim black bow tied at her throat, smiles and fires off a favorite expression.

“Oh, Phil,” she scolds. “Ca ca ca!”

The audience roars for the petite blonde who has dared to ask interviewees questions like: What was Liz Taylor like in bed? More times than not, she gets answers to her audacious queries, which lead to scoops like these:

--Jacqueline Kennedy had shock treatments.

--J.F.K.’s sister Rosemary was lobotomized.

--Ava Gardner aborted Sinatra’s baby.

--Liz Taylor aborted Sinatra’s baby.

--Sinatra’s mother was an abortionist.

--Sinatra once called Nancy Reagan “a dope with fat ankles.”

--Sen. John Warner wore a black sleep mask to bed.

For her scoops, Kitty Kelley works very, very hard. She said she did 857 interviews for the Sinatra book, more than 300 for the Taylor book, 350 for “Jackie Oh!” She maintained a file folder for every month of Sinatra’s life, reviewed FBI wiretaps, Senate crime committee testimony. She hires researchers and private detectives, will interview a single source up to 17 times.

Celebrity Dirt and Teacups

Parsing a famous life, she’s said, she always gets “obsessed,” if not a little possessed. She has said that she found herself talking in a Jacqueline Onassis whisper and shopping a lot; she ate too much while researching Liz Taylor. And with the Sinatra book? “I started kicking ass.”

All of which has afforded Kitty Kelley a historic 1807 manse atop a hill in Georgetown where she stores all that celebrity dirt and collects dainty teacups. Frequently she can be seen jogging through Rock Creek Park, a short, busty, bleached blonde in bright-red sweats. She dresses conservatively and expensively, carries Chanel purses that sell for upward of $1,000 each, wears Hermes scarfs and pert Adolfo suits, just like Nancy Reagan. She drives a $60,000 cherry-red Mercedes 560, reportedly part of her advance for the Reagan book. She calls herself an outsider, but more and more she shows up at Washington power parties, embassy soirees, benefits and awards dinners.

After years of derisive and dismissive reviews, being taken seriously is very important to Kitty Kelley, according to those who know her. “There’s something fragile about Kitty,” says Washington novelist Barbara Raskin, who has known Kelley for nearly 15 years. “The thing that is most important to Kitty is her good name. If you took away her money or her house, it couldn’t bother her as much as negative things being said about her. Or written about her. She wants respectability more than anything.”

At 46, she seems on the verge of earning it. Her Sinatra effort has been praised by William Safire. Bob Woodward attended the Sinatra book party and got an autographed copy. Last year, Kelley was given the Outstanding Author Award by the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Critics have finally begun to review her as a writer, instead of as a paste-up artist.

Yet at this juncture, she is flirting with the ultimate ostracism. Having taken on a national monument--Sinatra--and impressively reduced him to raving, paranoiac rubble, Kelley dares to invade the Republican holy of holies. She is investigating the wife of one of the most popular Presidents, a woman who has endured a mastectomy, her husband’s cancer, her husband’s shooting and Donald Regan’s venomous memoirs.

Because of Mrs. Reagan’s position, asserted Kelley, she is “fair game.”

Fair game. It’s an expression Kitty Kelley uses often when describing her quarry. All public figures are fair game, as she was reminded when a caller to the Larry King TV show asked: If someone pulled a skeleton out of your closet, how would you feel? “I’d feel awful,” she answered. “I’d feel just terrible.”

I hope she gets hit by a truck. --Nancy Sinatra on Kitty Kelley

Little is known of the private life of public figure Katherine (Kitty) Kelley. Friends of a decade and more will admit they know very little about her family and her background.

Says syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith: “I’ve known her since the mid ‘70s, and I’ve always seen her alone, for dinner or something. I don’t even know where she’s from. There’s never any talk of family, husband. Just work. And gossip, of course.”

In her hometown of Spokane, in D.C., in New York publishing circles, many people want to talk about Kitty Kelley--but not necessarily for attribution. Check with friends, interviewees, relatives, and the responses are swift, emotional--and sharply divided. One set is laudatory; Kitty Kelley is charming, a fine reporter and a loyal friend. The other set is cautious, even fearful: No way. I don’t think it wise. I still have to live in this town. I don’t want to talk about that woman.

More than 90 interviews confirmed this much: That woman appears to be two women--one a bright, vivacious, fun-loving friend who gives huge Christmas parties and labors tirelessly with writers’ organizations on tax and First Amendment issues, and whose worst vices are workaholism and diet cola. The other Kitty Kelley has even more private enemies than she does public ones. She flies into rages, uses foul language, litigates fiercely and is genuinely feared. The first woman can breezily, brilliantly dissect the subplots of “The Brothers Karamazov”; the second is a zealous inquisitor on celebrity sex, abortion and alcoholism.

Even in childhood, a duality existed, one that provoked wildly opposing impressions. Some people in Spokane say their most famous citizen since Bing Crosby led “the perfect life, a charmed life” there. Others say that she had a painful childhood and adolescence. Some agreed to interviews, then canceled or changed their minds about being quoted by name.

Life Not Idyllic

Spokane knew the Kelleys as prominent and well-to-do. But life was far from idyllic behind the big Tudoresque door of their sprawling hilltop home.

Marcia Gallucci still lives in Spokane, where she and Kelley went through grammar school at St. Augustine’s together, were Campfire Girls, rode in the same car pool, went to the Catholic girls’ high school, Holy Names Academy, where Kelley was consistently voted friendliest girl in the school. They both grew up in large, tumultuous Irish families. Their mothers were friendly. When Kitty married, Marcia gave her a wedding shower.

Kelley’s proclivity for exposing others comes, Gallucci thinks, from the childhood miseries Kitty couldn’t talk about back then.

“The mother is the key,” Gallucci says. “It’s no secret that she was a longtime alcoholic. It was very important for Kitty to be popular, to please those in authority. I believe it was a love-hate thing with her mother. She admired her mother. But I don’t think Kitty ever got her mother’s approval. There was nothing she could do.”

Owned Ranches

Adele (Delie) Kelley died 10 years ago at age 60, following a short, undisclosed illness. She was a heavy smoker, frail and tiny, barely five feet and a Size 3. Before she married in 1940, Delie Martin, a clothing merchant’s daughter, was a lively sorority girl--a Pi Beta Phi--at the University of Washington, class of ’39.

Her husband was 14 years her senior, from an old Spokane family that still owns wheat and barley ranches in Whitman County. The consensus is that Delie Martin married up. Her husband built her a grand home near the spot where they picnicked as sweethearts, high on Spokane’s South Hill overlooking a pretty vista unfortunately named Hangman Valley. They raised seven children in the house--six daughters and a son--and William Kelley, at 84 now a semiretired litigator, still lives there, with his second wife, Janet.

But it was built as Delie’s house, and while she lived there, she ruled with an iron hand. And a jangling set of keys. “She religiously padlocked the refrigerator,” Gallucci says, “so that no one could eat at will. Nothing was accessible to the kids. It would be absolutely disgusting to be heavy. (Delie) was extremely thin. She didn’t eat.”

Nonetheless, it was a life of privilege. The Kelleys enjoyed full-time household help, European vacations, country clubs. Theirs was a lively social set--bridge parties, golf, dinners and cocktails at the private Spokane Club. It is Spokane custom to spend summers at one of the many nearby lakes, and the Kelleys did this, at Hayden Lake in western Idaho. But unlike most families crammed into rustic cottages, they maintained two houses, one for the parents and one below for the children. Visitors remember that offspring were allowed in the upper house by invitation only.

Despite the household tensions, Kitty is remembered as a buoyant child, energetic, outgoing, with plenty of friends. “My memories are of her being absolutely perfect,” Gallucci says. “She’d never lose control publicly.”

Hostess at World’s Fair

After a stumbling start at the University of Arizona and a mysterious withdrawal from the school in May, 1962, Kelley entered the University of Washington in Seattle in January of ’63. In 1965, at age 23, Spokane news clips show she was a VIP hostess at the New York World’s Fair, where she led visitors such as Julie Andrews and Margaret Truman on private tours of the GE Pavilion and a show narrated by its spokesman, Ronald Reagan. It was her first opportunity to feel, up close and personal, the kind of celebrity heat that would fuel her career. Later, Kelley would remember that she thought one of her VIPs, Jacqueline Kennedy, seemed so human. She got out of the car with a run in her stocking!

When the fair closed, Kelley moved to Washington, where she got a temporary job in the office of Sen. Eugene McCarthy; she ended up staying almost four years. It has been alleged by one of her publishers and in print that Kelley overstated that job on subsequent resumes, calling herself McCarthy’s press secretary. The book jacket for “Jackie Oh!” was corrected once the error was discovered. But talk to the senator himself, and it appears to have just been part of the social confusion that was the ‘60s. What did Kelley do for him?

“She was affable and friendly,” McCarthy says. “A good receptionist.”

He thinks she may have distributed press releases, photocopied them, that sort of thing. He has no problem with whatever she called herself.

But press secretary?

“I don’t think that was in order.” He hesitates. “If Kitty called herself press person, it would have been quite all right.”

Her years on the Hill were lean ones, and Kelley was still financially strapped when, after the ’68 election, she found a job as a researcher on the Washington Post editorial page in early 1969.

Asked about his daughter’s writing career, William Kelley offers what he believes to be the truth: “She was really an investigative reporter for the Washington Post.” He says he wishes she’d stuck with it.

In fact, in 1971, after two years as research assistant, Kelley was called to task for taking excessive notes unrelated to her duties during editorial meetings and was asked to tender her resignation by Phil Geyelin, then editorial page editor.

She has said she left to pursue a free-lance writing career.

“When I was working at ‘Entertainment Tonight,’ somebody said to me, ‘Do you want to do a piece on Kitty Kelley?’ And I said, ‘Not unless it’s her obituary.’ ”

--Barbara Howar

Times were lean after Kelley left the Post. As she wrote of herself, “I’m a writer who barely pays the rent by grinding out articles like ‘How to Lose Weight and Seduce a Senator.’ ”

Then the affair of the Howar Papers got people talking about “reporter Kitty Kelley.” It percolated in Washington gossip columns in January of 1973. Fifteen years later, Howar still takes the incident very seriously. Here is what happened, according to her:

Howar had a well-publicized garage sale at her Georgetown house, selling furniture and odds and ends. Within days, she got a call informing her that Washingtonian magazine intended to publish excerpts of the rough manuscript of her soon-to-be-published memoir, “Laughing All the Way.”

Kelley’s version, according to Washingtonian editor Jack Limpert, was that she’d found the papers in the drawer of a small Sheraton table being bought by an elderly woman and purchased them from her for $2.

Her Only Copy

Howar, who said the manuscript was her only copy and had been in her upstairs study, off-limits during the sale, was bewildered. And horrified. “I was writing about my children, my husband, my life, the President--and it was in its rawest form.”

“That I would bring it down to the basement and put it in the drawer of a table I was selling is highly unlikely.” She said as much publicly. “And (Kelley) had lawyers threaten to sue me for libel.”

It would be the beginning of a long string of legal skirmishes for Kitty Kelley. Though Howar says now that she probably overreacted, not realizing the strength of her position as author and owner, she spent more on legal fees than she received for an excerpt of the book in Ladies’ Home Journal.

After consulting with its lawyers, Washingtonian did not publish the material. But Limpert still damned it in print, and it was quoted by Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire, whom Kelley had been friendly with when she worked at the paper and who also got a copy of the manuscript.

‘I Have No Illusions’

The following year, Kelley repeatedly, persistently sought an interview with the young, recently widowed senator from Delaware, Joe Biden. He hadn’t talked to the press in the year and a half since the highway deaths of his wife and infant daughter before Christmas of ’72. His staffers felt it was time, and he granted the interview.

Her story ran in Washingtonian, and afterward, Joe Biden would not sit for another profile for nearly 10 years. It ran with the headline “Death and the All-American Boy,” and a boldface quote above his photo: “I have no illusions about why I am such a hot commodity. I am the youngest man in the Senate and I am also the victim of a tragic fate.”

It caught the 31-year-old senator with his media savvy down, talking about his dating situation and his sex life with his wife. People do talk to Kitty Kelley, recalling her as engaging, friendly and very down to earth. What they often forget is that the other Kitty--that woman--will print anything they say, sometimes with her own shading.

To wit: “Biden tells him (Sen. Thomas Eagleton) a joke with an anti-Semitic punch line and asks that it be off the record.”

There were immediate objections from Eagleton and Biden’s administrative aide, Wes Barthelmes, and in a subsequent issue of Washingtonian, Kelley apologized for misinterpreting Biden’s remark. Biden told the anecdote to illustrate--with dismay--anti-Semitism he’d encountered in a certain Delaware county.

Scoop No. 2 did cause great distress to Biden’s family, friends and staff. It earned Kitty Kelley about $500. And, says Washingtonian editor Limpert, “it really got people talking.”

I thought I was writing about the golden girl of the 20th Century. I thought she had everything God could possibly give a woman--youth, beauty, brains, wealth. . . . I had no idea of the sadness she’d had in her life. I mean sadness that comes from being so erratic, neurotic, lonely and unfulfilled.

--Kitty Kelley on Jacqueline Onassis

It was more than 10 years ago that independent publisher Lyle Stuart, a former business manager for Mad magazine who published celebrity bios, movie books and diet books, coaxed Kelley into beginning “Jackie Oh!.”

He says he just had a hunch Kelley was the right one to go after the President’s widow. Forty-three Jackie books had already been done when he proposed the idea to her.

“She said, ‘Oh, no, I don’t even know her.’ ”

Stuart laughs at the nascent biographer’s naivete. His voice slides into the ersatz Southern accent that often colors Kelley’s speech: “Why, Laaaahle, nobody’s going to talk to me.”

“Cinderella sells,” he told her. “Cinderella sells.”

Kelley worked very hard. Her friends remember her as determined, but quite nervous. Would anyone close to Jackie talk? Would she stop her friends from talking? Would she sue? It is a pattern of anxieties that has persisted through subsequent books, says Donna Mackie: “There’s always great Angst and concern. But I think that’s just the way she works. Kitty is not a calm person. Maybe a little hyper.”

Kelley has said she was despairing until Liz Smith offered her files containing five years of her own research. “I’d been going to write a book (on Onassis) and then I’d given up,” Smith says.

Kelley has acknowledged a debt to Smith: “When I saw the bulging cardboard boxes sitting in her apartment, I knew I could do it.”

The Kelley Methodology--a relentless accumulation of original, old and borrowed information--took shape. She canvassed friends, servants, friends of friends. Hunting up fresh material, she followed the slimmest lead.

Lyle Stuart felt Kelley had truly mastered his lessons when she ensnared former Sen. George Smathers of Florida, a longtime Kennedy friend.

Smathers was quoted on Jack Kennedy’s healthy libido, as well as their adventures when the two maintained a Potomac love nest before J.F.K. was married. He described the President’s perfunctory sexual technique with an allusion to barnyard animals. Kelley has recalled that she “giggled at every outrageous anecdote.” But Smathers is still not amused.

“She was charming, I guess,” he says. “Squatty little thing but OK in the face. In those days they didn’t tape. She was writing very vigorously.” But what she did get him to admit, he says, was skillfully extracted. He was ensnared by solid, true information that Kelley had collected researching her first book, “The Glamour Spas.”

“It seems she’d been my ex-wife’s roommate at a fat farm,” Smathers says. “Oh, I can see those two yakking until the wee hours. She walked in here and said, ‘I know all about when you and Jack went to Vendome in 1956.’ ”

When the book came out, Kennedy stalwarts castigated Smathers. Some shunned him. “Kitty Kelley has made my life miserable for the last 10 years,” he says.

The hard-cover did gangbusters, and in paperback, “Jackie Oh!” became Ballantine’s biggest book of the year.

Within months of her triumph, Kelley was at war with Lyle Stuart. There was a lawsuit by a “Jackie Oh!” source. Worse, there was a nettlesome option clause on her next project that Stuart would not release her from. She wanted to do her next book about Elizabeth Taylor; Stuart didn’t want that book, but he wanted Kitty Kelley.

Kelley was equally hardheaded. It had to be Liz. Three times she tried her Taylor proposal on Stuart, and each time he refused. Finally, Kelley submitted what is known as an “option buster” manuscript, a novel called “Reunion.” It was, Stuart says, “dreadful.” Stuart believed it was written by Kelley’s husband, an unpublished novelist. When he rejected the novel, Kelley sold it to Simon & Schuster, the company that also intended to pay a $150,000 advance for her Liz Taylor book. The sale of the novel proved it publishable, thereby “busting” Stuart’s option. However, when Simon & Schuster actually began editing the novel for publication, Kelley abruptly bought it back, returning her $25,000 advance. At the time, she stated that she did not wish it published under her name.

Frank Sinatra was the first person to take me seriously.

--Kitty Kelley

On Oct. 2, 1986, Bantam Books Vice President Stuart Applebaum walked into Kitty Kelley’s suite at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Mass., and apologized for interrupting an interview. But he had some news. On Oct. 12, the first week it would be eligible for the New York Times best-seller list, “His Way” would debut at No. 1.

Little Kitty, happy at last. She was rich and famous. She was news, live at 5. When People magazine excerpted “His Way,” CBS sent camera crews to New York City newsstands to record the clamor. When the book itself hit the stores Sept. 26, minicams prowled the retail chains, soliciting the opinion of the man in the street as though it were the Lindbergh kidnaping.

Says Applebaum: “As an event, it was comparable only to when we published the Tower Commission Report overnight and camera crews were bumping into each other in the stacks.”

Kelley’s triumph was in large part the result of a three-year publicity campaign unwittingly begun by Sinatra himself. When he filed suit against Kelley in September of 1983, alleging she misrepresented herself to sources as having his cooperation, Ol’ Blue Eyes made a fatal mistake: He got in a media war with Kitty Kelley.

Sinatra, who has used nightclub and concert hall stages to excoriate reporters, columnists and newspaper owners, was asking for sympathy. What he got was one huge Fourth Estate Bronx cheer.

Sinatra’s formal complaint alleging Kelley’s misrepresentation was rarely if ever part of media accounts of the dispute. Instead, the Sinatra case became a First Amendment issue in the press, aided by a strong and vocal contingent of writers’ organizations. Coordinating the defense was the Washington Independent Writers, an organization that Kitty Kelley had worked very hard for since 1975, when she joined it as a charter member.

Coming to her aid were some journalistic heavyweights. She was well and handsomely defended by the best and the brightest: William Safire wrote a column, the Baltimore Sun offered a supportive editorial, cartoonists Garry Trudeau and Jules Feiffer took up their pens and skewered Frank Sinatra. The controversy--and the publicity--lasted for a year, until Sinatra dropped his suit in September of ’84. During that time, Kelley was interviewed often. All the video shadowboxing with the specter of Sinatra left her fighting fit.

Kelley dug into her research. She was, she has said, a woman possessed. Now that everyone was watching, it had to be good. And this time, it had to have footnotes.

Washington writer Dan Moldea, himself the author of three books on the Mafia, gave Kelley, a friend, voluminous files and introduced her to many of his sources.

Moldea is no longer speaking with Kelley, who he says failed to return the favor (when he needed a file) and passed advance information to another writer working on a book competitive to one of his. Personally, he says, “I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.” But he says he has great admiration for her accomplishment with Sinatra. “To sit (Peter) Lawford down and get an interview on the Rat Pack days. Historically, that was an important interview, and I have a lot of respect for her for pulling that one off.”

Kelley’s greatest coup was in debriefing Lawford, once a close Sinatra friend, who was ultimately expelled from the Rat Pack. L.A. writer Jack Martin, whose home Kelley rented while working on the book, recalls her returning from her first session with Lawford at Hollywood’s Hamburger Hamlet flushed with excitement. “It went wonderfully. I’m getting everything I need,” she told Martin. “But at the end, the poor man had to beg me for money for a pack of cigarettes.”

By the time Kelley interviewed him in 1983, Lawford was a hopeless alcoholic, cross-addicted to drugs as well. And shortly after the interview, Lawford himself complained to People magazine that he had been “conned” by Kelley. “An old photographer friend I had known since the Kennedy years brought her to my home to do a piece for a magazine on the 20th anniversary of Jack’s death,” he said. “Because I don’t read sleaze, I did not recognize her name.” Kelley denied such misrepresentation, saying she had told him she was doing a book on Sinatra.

Lawford died of alcoholism before “His Way” was published.

In the media orgy that followed the publication of “His Way,” Kelley was prickly with other print journalists who questioned her sources. But on radio and television, under some tough questioning, she was poised, smiling and prepared.

Three of Kelley’s four biography subjects are women. For her first book, “The Glamour Spas,” she spent weeks among women involved in the most intimate rituals and toilettes before she wrote the text that would characterize them as spoiled “piggies,” “shapeless blobs,” “oversize carcasses” and “jiggling pink blimps” who gossip like “bilge pumps.”

In her biographies, the most vivid, horrifying characters are the celebrity mothers--women who, like Kelley’s own strict, mercurial, alcoholic mother, demand high performance and blind fealty. In Kelley’s books, wives are unhappy and tormented. Few details are spared: the abortions, the beatings, the perverse infidelities, the most intimate griefs.

Now, as she researches her Nancy Reagan biography, Kitty Kelley lives alone in her Georgetown home, another public figure with private sorrows. In the post-publication of “Jackie Oh!” she had announced in Women’s Wear Daily that she was having a hysterectomy. By last spring, her 12-year marriage to media director/writer Michael Edgley had come apart. No divorce papers have been filed in court here.

At the moment of Kelley’s greatest wealth and success, a rash of personal feuds had erupted as well. Five formerly good friends had stopped speaking to her, and last spring, Kelley severed her relationship with columnist Liz Smith--a friend for more than a decade--when Smith reported that an unauthorized biography of Kelley titled “Bimbo” was in the works by a reporter for the Star tabloid. (“Bimbo: The Kitty Kelley Story,” is to be published by Kelley’s former publisher, Lyle Stuart.)

Before launching full-bore into the Nancy Reagan project, Kelley turned her sights on magazine journalism--and two more women. The articles--both cover stories--dealt with extramarital affairs, grief, abortion, a dying marriage. Both of her subjects were women who had become public figures owing to their relationships with famous and powerful men. And both were at acute crisis points. Judith Campbell Exner, who has written about her liaisons with J.F.K., Sinatra and mobster Sam Giancana, was terminally ill when she spoke to Kelley. Suzanne Cooke, now the ex-wife of Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke, was then embroiled in a tempestuous relationship with Cooke. She was under a doctor’s care for extreme emotional stress related to the relationship and two unwanted abortions.

Both Exner and Cooke say they contacted Kelley voluntarily. Both say she was initially kind, sympathetic and easy to confide in. And both of them say they wish they had never talked to her.

They say she took over their life stories as though she owned them. And after her articles appeared, Kelley denigrated her subjects on television, calling Exner “paranoid” and calling Cooke’s story “sordid.” Ask them about their objections to Kelley’s interviewing style and both answer the same.

All she wanted to know about was sex.